


Revenge, and a Waltz

by devilsnowcandy



Category: Journey into Mystery
Genre: Angst, Depressing, F/M, Off-screen Character Death, Pretentious as fuck, Short, Spoilers, Vignette
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-13
Updated: 2012-09-13
Packaged: 2017-11-14 03:30:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 675
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/510860
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/devilsnowcandy/pseuds/devilsnowcandy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Loki promised Leah a dance.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Revenge, and a Waltz

**Author's Note:**

> This contains HUGE spoilers for Everything Burns, up to and including Journey Into Mystery 643. It will also probably (hopefully?) be Jossed by next week. 
> 
> I realize there is a tense change in there. It's intentional.

For millenia she waited, purposeless. Alone. A hundred thousand years is a long time, even for the issue of a god. Her thoughts turned from confusion to hate, from memories to dreams, and ever she kept a watch for the moment when he would come into being.

Loki’s first birth and life she watched idly, without focus or intention. Days and years passed while she looked away, on other things, other places, waiting for her chance to destroy him. 

She missed his death, of all things, but she was there when he came back. She was there and watching when he journeyed to Hel and met – her. Other her. What was the feeling that drove through her as she watched her double – her first self – taunt him, shout at him, stay with him? It couldn’t be jealousy. Neither Leah had been supposed to feel. Hate and anger are quite enough for an ink-made puppet to learn.

She is hoping for tears when she approaches him in Muspelheim – tears, begging, wounded betrayal. She knows him for the sick, pathetic, cowardly, lying child that he is. She, who has watched him with faithful obsession since Thor first returned him to the living, knows his nature better than her own.

She believes.

Is this a genuine apology in his face, in his eyes? She believes it is genuine anger when he speaks of the other Asgardians. He is grimacing, he is in pain, and she thinks he believes himself honest. She thinks that it will destroy him to do as he claims he wishes.

That will be a good revenge.

So she makes his case for Surtur. They have a moment together, waiting, before he goes to betray his brother’s hard-won trust. Just the two of them. Loki and Leah. BFFs. Something curls in her chest. Happiness?

Neither of them reaches for the other’s hand, and he will not look at her – only at his ever-present familiar.

“It’s time,” he says, and gives her a shadow of the obnoxious grin he always favoured the real Leah with. She gives him a smirk of her own, and then they have gone their separate ways to bring the worlds, flaming, to their knees.

\--

When they meet again, it is on a battlefield that was once a home.

Surtur’s fires have scoured the town of Broxton, incinerated the halls of the gods. The Asgardians are no more.

Loki steps from behind a blackened pillar. “You made it!” he says, “I’m so pleased, I was afraid you’d stand me up. Like a horrible first date in a movie.”

His voice is light, and he looks – she believes – genuinely happy to see her here, among the dead and burned.

She holds out a hand. “You promised me a dance,” she reminds him.

He slips his hand into hers, cold but firm. She draws him away from the pillar. “Are you well pleased?” she asks.

“Very well pleased,” he says. “There is nothing quite like simultaneously fulfilling and destroying everyone’s expectations.”

He is smiling still, a little, but his gaze drifts over the ruins. It is impossible to identify any of the bodies, even with the puddled remains of their armour, but his eyes linger on certain ones longer than others. There is a flatness to his gaze that wasn’t there before. She notices the little dog he had with him in Muspelheim is gone. 

_Liar,_ she thinks. _This has made you miserable._

But it is what she wanted, and she is nothing more than ink, so there is no grief in her for him. She turns them so they are facing one another and takes his other hand. 

“Did you practise?” he asks. “I know you probably didn’t have much time, but this will be easier if we both actually know how to dance – ”

“Shut up, Loki.”

She knows how to dance. She looked up a Youtube tutorial while he was sleeping, weeks ago, when the other Leah was watching him so dutifully.

They begin: a waltz, to the rhythm of the wind.


End file.
